Keep your bluetooth both hands-free and hack-free

“Cell phone users are increasingly turning to Bluetooth technology to talk hands-free on their phones. According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, ten states have passed laws which prohibit all drivers from using handheld cell phones while driving. As hands-free devices gain popularity, scammers are finding ways to exploit it.

Scammers use specialized software to intercept your Bluetooth signal and hack into your device. It’s called ‘bluebugging.’ Doing this gives them access to your text messages, contacts, photos and call history.

Scammers tend to hang out in busy areas in order to hack into phones. They sometimes use hacked phones to make long distance calls. However, the newest scheme has scammers using the hacked number to set up pay-per-minute numbers to rack up charges.

Better Business Bureau offers tips to ensure your personal data stays safe from Bluetooth hackers:

• Passwords. Always use a minimum of eight characters in your PIN. The longer your code, the more difficult it is to crack.
• Sign-off. Switch your Bluetooth into ‘not discoverable’ mode when you aren’t using it. If you make a call from your car, be sure to switch it off when you get out.
• Be wary of unknown requests. Don’t accept pairing requests from unknown parties. If you happen to pair your phone with a hacker’s computer, then all your data is at risk.
• Stay updated. Make sure you download and install regular security updates. Device manufactures will release updates to address threats and correct weaknesses.”

Microsoft Is Working On Its Own Smart Watch [Rumor]

“Google has definitely taken the world of wearable computing by storm with Glass, but there’s another class of wearable computers that’s slowly gaining popularity – the smart watch. Pebble already proved that there’s a demand for smart watches with its $10 million Kickstarter, and Apple is rumored to be dabbling with the tech as well. Now another tech giant is joining in.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft may be working on a smart watch design. The news comes from Microsoft suppliers in Asia that were asked to ship smart watch components to the company for testing. It’s said that Microsoft’s hardware designers are looking into it, but there’s no guarantee that Microsoft will move ahead with it.

So, what will Microsoft’s potential smart watch look like? There’s not much information available at the moment, but we do know that the company ordered 1.5-inch displays from its suppliers. It would be a bit bigger than Pebble’s 1.26-inch display, but display size isn’t exactly the most important aspect of a smart watch. What’s most important is its functionality and which phones it can work with. Windows Phone is the most obvious choice, but Microsoft would be stupid not to add support for iOS and Android as well.

Still, all of this is merely a rumor for now, just like Apple’s own rumored smart watch. These devices may not even see the light of day as smart watches, while popular among certain groups, are still struggling to find mass market adoption. Microsoft should know this better than anybody else as its previous foray into wearable computing didn’t exactly receive a warm welcome.”

Britain swaps traditional TV sets for handheld devices

“Brits own fewer TV sets than we did in 2003, but that doesn’t spell bad news for the TV industry.

While each British home was the proud owner of 2.3 TV sets in 2003, ten years later the average household only owns 1.8 – but, according to TV Licensing’s annual TeleScope study, the amount of time each of us spends watching telly is on the rise.

British citizens now watch an average of four hours and two minutes of TV a day, an increase of 26 minutes from three hours and 36 minutes in 2006.

The growing popularity of TV is partly explained by the fact that rather than sitting down in front of the box, or owning multiple TVs, we are more likely to watch telly on handheld devices like laptops, smart phones and tablets. BBC iPlayer reported an increase of 177% on requests from mobiles and tablets in 2012 and noted that audiences spent 34% more time watching iPlayer as a whole.”

Barnes & Noble Weighs Its E-Reader Investment

“Even for a company with a lot of bad news lately, the bulletin from Barnes & Noble this month had an ominous feel.

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, losses in its Nook Media division — which includes sales of e-books and devices — will be greater than the year before and that the unit’s revenue for all of fiscal 2013 would be far below projections it gave of $3 billion.

The problem was not so much the extent of the losses, but what the losses might signal: that the digital approach that Barnes & Noble has been heavily investing in as its future for the last several years has essentially run its course.

A person familiar with Barnes & Nobles’s strategy acknowledged that this quarter, which includes holiday sales, has caused executives to realize the company must move away from its program to engineer and build its own devices and focus more on licensing its content to other device makers.

‘They are not completely getting out of the hardware business, but they are going to lean a lot more on the comprehensive digital catalog of content,’ said this person, who asked not to be identified discussing corporate strategy.

On Thursday, the person said, the company will emphasize its commitment to intensify partnerships with other tablet producers like Microsoft and Samsung to make deals for content that it controls.

If Barnes & Noble does indeed pull back from building tablets, it would be a 180-degree shift for a company that as late as last year was promoting the Nook as its future. ‘Had we not launched devices and spent the money we invested in the Nook, investors and analysts would have said, ’Barnes & Noble is crazy, and they’re going to go away,’ ‘ William Lynch, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview last January.

Since 2009, when Barnes & Noble first decided to invest in building the device, its financial commitment to the division has been substantial. (The company does not disclose exact figures.) At the beginning of 2012, that bet seemed to be paying off and the digital future seemed hopeful.

In May, Microsoft decided to give a cash infusion to the product by pledging more than $600 million to Nook Media. In December, the British textbook publisher Pearson bought a 5 percent stake in the unit for nearly $90 million.

Going into the 2012 Christmas season, the Nook HD, Barnes & Noble’s entrant into the 7-inch and 9-inch tablet market, was winning rave reviews from technology critics who praised its high-quality screen. Editors at CNET called it ‘a fantastic tablet value’ and David Pogue in The New York Times told readers choosing between the Nook HD and Kindle Fire that the Nook ‘is the one to get.’

But while tablet sales exploded over the Christmas season, Barnes & Noble was not a beneficiary. Buyers preferred Apple devices by a long mile but then went on to buy Samsung, Amazon and Google products before those of Barnes & Noble, according to market analysis by Forrester Research.

‘In many ways it is a great product,’ Sarah Rotman Epps, a senior analyst at Forrester, said of the Nook tablet. ‘It was a failure of brand, not product.

ASUS PadFone Infinity announced: 5-inch, 1080p screen, Snapdragon 600 CPU and full HD tablet display (hands-on)

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/25/asus-padfone-infinity-announced/

“You may have heard a new PadFone was on the way — it’s not like ASUS has been dropping obvious hints or anything. In any case, surprise! ASUS just unveiled a new model, the PadFone Infinity. Like other PadFones, this is a handset that slips into a tablet-like dock, allowing you to make use of a bigger screen. This time, though, it ships with Android 4.2, and the display has grown from 4.7 inches to 5. The resolution is now 1080p (up from 720p), which comes out to 441 pixels per inch. Additionally, the tablet’s 10.1-inch screen has a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200, up from 1,280 x 800 in the last-gen model. It’s plenty bright, too, at 400 nits, but that’s a slight step down from the last-gen model, which lit up to 500 nits.

What’s more, the phone’s gotten an upgrade on the inside: it now packs a quad-core, 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 chip with an Adreno 320 GPU, some of the freshest components Qualcomm has to offer at the moment. Also on-board, you get 2GB of RAM to help boost performance, with your choice of either 32GB or 64GB of built-in storage. As far as connectivity, you’re looking at EDGE, GPRS, GSM, WCDMA, LTE and DC-HSPA+, along with all the usual radios: WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, A-GPS and even GLONASS. According to an ASUS rep, the device uses a nano-SIM rather than micro-SIM. Around back, ASUS has added a 13-megapixel autofocusing camera with an LED flash, five-element, f/2.0 lens and burst shooting at eight fps. There’s a front camera too, capped at 2MP, in case you want to do the occasional video chat. Meanwhile, the 2,400mAh battery promises up to 19 hours of 3G talk time, and up to 40 with the dock attached.

Like every other PadFone that’s been released, this won’t be available in the US, but the phone-and-dock combo will cost £799 / €999 when it goes on sale in Europe this April. The phone is also headed to Asia, though we don’t have any more details. You’ll also have your choice of colors, we hear: gray, gold and hot pink, if that’s what you’re into.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Shuttleworth’s one device: The smartphone is the tablet and the PC

“Summary: Forget post-PC. Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth envisions a future where the smartphone is the brain of your tablet as well as your laptop and even your TV set, all connected to the cloud.

One device, one cloud. Let’s get together and feel all right.

It sounds very Bob Marley, but that is exactly what Canonical’s South African CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, is suggesting will be the future of computing.

In a video posted to YouTube this week, a very Bono-like Shuttleworth, channelling his inner Jony Ive and Steve Jobs, spoke at length about the mobile version of the company’s open-source and Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu for tablets. The OS will be entering a preview release shortly that will be installable on selected Android hardware, such as Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets and Galaxy Nexus phone.

The mobile version of Ubuntu has spent a long time in gestation. Canonical is entering the tablet and smartphone market five years after industry leaders Apple, Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry all carved out their respective chunks of the consumer and enterprise pie for mobile operating system mindshare.

Of course, we’re talking about a very dynamic and volatile industry, where anyone coming up with a better idea can disrupt the marketplace. It’s also a market where the existing players aren’t sitting still, and are constantly improving their software and continuing to battle for better market position.

The future of mobile computing is absolutely not set in stone. I really have no idea how well the mobile version of Ubuntu will be received, whether OEMs will choose to create product offerings out of it, or developers will dedicate time to porting applications to it.

I don’t want to make any predictions about Ubuntu for tablets, if only because I work for a company that is itself jostling for mobile position in the tablet and smartphone space, and it would be improper and unethical for someone who has a captive audience on a major technology content site to make forward-looking statements about competitors.

However, it is what Shuttleworth said toward the end of this video that I found most compelling, and I think what he speaks about in general can be considered in a platform-agnostic form as being very prescient about the future state of mobile and desktop computing.”